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Ep #107: The Unexpectedly Smart Way to Become an Entrepreneur Full Episode Transcript With Your Host The Brainfluence Podcast with Roger Dooley Ep #107: The Unexpectedly Smart Way to Become an Entrepreneur Welcome to The Brainfluence Podcast with Roger Dooley, author, speaker and educator on neuromarketing and the psychology of persuasion. Every week, we talk with thought leaders that will help you improve your influence with factual evidence and concrete research. Introducing your host, Roger Dooley. Roger Dooley: Welcome to The Brainfluence Podcast. I’m Roger Dooley. Our guest this week is a writer and venture capitalist, not to mention a serious travel fanatic. His claim to fame that will probably resonate most with our listeners is that he’s credited with popularizing the term FOMO, F-O-M-O, fear of missing out. His new book is The 10% Entrepreneur: Live Your Startup Dream Without Quitting Your Day Job. Welcome to the show, Patrick McGinnis. Patrick McGinnis: Thank you, Roger. Good to be here. Roger Dooley: Patrick, most of our listeners are interested in applying psychology and brain science to marketing so I guess almost every one of them has run across the term “fear of missing out” which is frequently abbreviated to FOMO which I guess is an indication of how popular it’s become. I sort of assumed that this had evolved organically overtime but according to Boston Magazine, you can claim some of the credit for that. What’s the story on that? Patrick McGinnis: It’s kind of an amazing story. It was a term that I discovered among my friends actually when I was an MBA student at Harvard Business School in 2003-2004. We used it all the time. We used FOMO The Brainfluence Podcast with Roger Dooley Ep #107: The Unexpectedly Smart Way to Become an Entrepreneur and FOBO, fear of a better option, which is sort of like the opposite. Fear of missing out is the idea that you want to be everywhere at once. Fear of a better option is the idea that you sort of like don’t commit to anything until the last minute so you have all your options on the table. HBS is a hotbed of FOMO and FOBO because you have a bunch of people in their 20s running around, lots of things going on. It’s just a place where people are optimizers. So I noticed this behavior among my friends myself and I thought it was kind of ridiculous. So I wrote an article for the school paper called “McGinnis’ Two FOs: Social Theory at HBS.” Posted it to the website of the paper back in 2004 and it was sort of mildly popular at school and it was reposted on a few blogs here and there. That was kind of the end of it. I didn’t really think much about it beyond that and of course, the term became popular. But about a year and half ago a reporter contacted me and he’d done a study on the origins of FOMO and he traced it back to me. It was quite interesting because I’ve heard other people sort of claim that they popularized FOMO. There was an NPR story earlier this year that traced it back to 2011. Obviously, I’m seven years ahead of that and three years before any other mention on the internet. So it was kind of extraordinary and it was actually one of the big things that got me the book deal was The Brainfluence Podcast with Roger Dooley Ep #107: The Unexpectedly Smart Way to Become an Entrepreneur the fact that when this article came out, some of the publishers started reading my proposal all of a sudden. Roger Dooley: Well they wouldn’t want to miss out. Patrick McGinnis: [Laughs] Exactly. Roger Dooley: That’s really great. I hope you get some royalties from FOMO revenue. Patrick McGinnis: It’s open source technology. I will say that every time FOMO appears in popular culture and it seems like it’s appearing more and more, I get an email, a text, or some other communication. So the most that I've gotten out of FOMO is a clogged inbox. Roger Dooley: Well, it’s something. Let’s talk about your book. I’m going to repeat the title, The 10% Entrepreneur: Live Your Startup Dream Without Quitting your Day Job. I’m thinking that there’s some people who might take issue with that subtitle itself. I’m not sure that living the startup dream really involves also working a full time day job. Some people might view that as more of a nightmare. [Laughter] Explain that. Patrick McGinnis: Absolutely. Well it’s a good question. I've heard a lot of people—some of the feedback I've gotten as I've talked to people is “How do you do both?” Or, “I've seen on Shark Tank that if you have a job you need to sort of quit and put all of your energies into your The Brainfluence Podcast with Roger Dooley Ep #107: The Unexpectedly Smart Way to Become an Entrepreneur startup if you're going to do this and be successful.” That’s a perspective that I think is fair in some ways. But the concept of the book is actually to turn that around. The idea is to say lots of people have FOMO. They want to be entrepreneurs. They work at a day job. They go to an office every day and they wish—you know, they have a great idea that they always talk about at the cocktail party. “I'd like to start this company.” But they're never going to do it because being an entrepreneur full time requires tremendous sacrifice. There’s this culture of glamorization of entrepreneurship that we’ve seen emerging where people try to make it look like it’s this fun adventure and that it’s like this great experience where you're going to have lots of fun and drink coffee and wear skinny jeans and a hoodie and ride around Brooklyn on a bicycle. That is not the reality of building businesses as anybody who’s ever done it knows. It requires financial sacrifice. It’s a very tough lifestyle. It requires a reasonably high chance of failure. You have to accept that. There’s a study from Harvard Business School professor, Shikhar Ghosh, that says that roughly 70 percent of startups don’t return expected returns and less of that actually are really successful. So you have all these risks. What I say to people is, “Accept those risks.” But instead of being that person who says, “I can't do The Brainfluence Podcast with Roger Dooley Ep #107: The Unexpectedly Smart Way to Become an Entrepreneur this. I'm never going to do this.” Find a way to make entrepreneurship work for you. So the idea of The 10% Entrepreneur is to spend 10 percent of your time, money, and energy investing, advising, and even starting new businesses on the side. If you do that, you’ll be able to create things that will be sustainable within the rest of your life. Roger Dooley: Yeah, so are the Shark Tank folks wrong? Because I was actually going to bring that up because it seems like every now and then one of their entrepreneurs looking for funding comes in and it turns out that they’ve got a pretty good day job. The hosts always take issue with that and either dismiss them as not really being serious about their business or basically say, “Well the only way I’m going to invest in this is if you bail out.” Although I guess if Mark Cuban is going to invest in your startup then probably bailing out of your full time job wouldn’t be that big of a sacrifice. Patrick McGinnis: Well maybe. It’s interesting, Mark Cuban is a great guy and I have tremendous respect for him but lots of the things he invests in are failures as well. When your company fails, Mark Cuban is not going to give you another job. What I talk about in the book, and I have some great examples of this, are people who find a way to make things work for them. I have these two guys in Long Island, they work at a car dealership. They wanted to start a brewery. They started it on the side. Now they have a full time staff that works for them at the brewery but The Brainfluence Podcast with Roger Dooley Ep #107: The Unexpectedly Smart Way to Become an Entrepreneur they have really good jobs and they like their jobs. They make great money. So they’ve started this brewery and now four years later, they have north of 30 employees working for them. They have a 6,000 square foot location. They're serving their beer at Yankee Stadium. But they haven't had to take on the risks. They’ve got kids. They’ve got lifestyles that they don’t want to lose. So they're able to do both of those things very successfully. Roger Dooley: Well that’s great if you can pull it off. I’ll share my own experience that I think you’d probably find would resonate with you. My first entrepreneurial effort was way back in the early 1980s when home computers were just coming on the scene. I was in charge of strategic planning for a Fortune 1000 Company and the company’s R&D director and I both went out and bought TI home computers the week they were introduced at their new lower price.

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